Crafting great web destinations is not about technique. It’s not even about technology. You can have the best team, fast servers, and amazing VCs behind you. But those things, although important, don’t matter as much as the golden key: insight.

Insight gives you an invitation to explore the customer’s mind. It lets you know what they want. Hence, you can engage in customer-driven development. It’s like a compass for your journey. Here’s why insight is important:

• It helps lead. Insight helps align your people towards new ideas and fresh perspectives that aid in better serving customers. The best people want to work for insightful companies. Never underestimate the value of impactful projects, truly great employees want to be involved in them.
• Your team becomes a pioneering entity. And this is the essence of entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship. These pioneering winds further empower your team to work more effectively in the projects and solutions that could improve the world.
• It’s a competitive advantage. Probably the best kind, because insight becomes a seed of innovation that leads your company into a new direction where it can harvest the fruits of exploring a new perspective. Ideally, you will end up with an array of competitive advantages and secrets that can increase your valuation and create a wide technological moat that’s hard to crack.
• Insight helps you focus. So you can avoid scope creep, long hours at the office, and gridlock. When you know, truly know, what’s important, you can focus on the key features that truly make a difference.

So go out, get market insights, customer insights, and even technological insights and base your projects or startups around those. You can thank me later!

Suggested Article: Playing catch-up: How to partner with the retailer of the future, from McKinsey & Company (Ideal for CPG Companies and Startups wanting to create an insight portfolio).